panoramix released

Derived from the Spat engine, panoramix is a new workstation for the mixing, post-production and diffusion of spatial audio.
It runs as a standalone application on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Please have a look at the quick start manual.

I confirm that the icon is back. Thank you.
I still have a question about the price though. It is indicated that there is an introductory price of 81€33 for this tool, but when I add it to my cart, the final price is stil 100€. Is it normal?

We are pleased to offer you a discount for orders placed before May 31, 2017.
In France, 81.33 € HT (Hors Taxes, out of taxes) makes 100€ TTC (Toute taxe comprise, all taxes included).
The final price may vary depending on the local taxes policy.

Very nice new version! Works fine so far and seems pretty logical. I have a few questions:

It is very nice that the software allows for recording of the encoded HOA while monitoring the decoding.

– If you set up a HOA bus at 7th order, but want to monitor in a lower order, does the software automatically select the correct decoder configuration? It sounds a little strange for me at the moment, but as I’m not in my ‘critical listening room’ to check thoroughly right now, maybe you can confirm whether it should do this.

– If you set up a 3D HOA bus but want to monitor in 2D, I can manually set up the 2-D speakers, but am again not sure if the correct decoding option is selected (e.g. decoding from just the horizontal components of the full set).

Would be super if you can confirm…. and then I can test appropriately and give a more thorough report of any strange behaviour.

Compression, EQ etc: in the signal flow chart, these appear to be added prior to the HOA encoding stage. Therefore, to add mastering to the encoded signal, this needs to be added on the master output strip. Correct? If so, I have a feature request to add an EQ and Dyn option to the bus, in the post-encoding / pre-decoding stage.

– In the HOA bus, I’m missing a way to control the radius and drop (as in the spat.oper). Have these functions been hardwired, or is there somewhere to change them that I have missed?

– Question concerning the reverb:
I hear that the reverb is mixed in to the encoded stage, as in the spat.spat / spat.oper approach. Is the reverb implemented with the same method as in spat.spat / spat.oper? Or have you implemented a different reverb approach? Again, something I don’t think I’ll hear until monitoring over a larger HOA loudspeaker array.

Finally, another feature request: it would be very nice to be able to choose if the reverb is mixed into the direct HOA outputs, or routed out of a different set of outputs, allowing the user to record direct and reverb as separate layers.

– If you set up a HOA bus at 7th order, but want to monitor in a lower order, does the software automatically select the correct decoder configuration? It sounds a little strange for me at the moment, but as I’m not in my ‘critical listening room’ to check thoroughly right now, maybe you can confirm whether it should do this.

Not sure to fully understand. Could you be more specific and/or send your session file ?

– If you set up a 3D HOA bus but want to monitor in 2D, I can manually set up the 2-D speakers, but am again not sure if the correct decoding option is selected (e.g. decoding from just the horizontal components of the full set).

Nope. At the moment, there is no strategy to automagically downgrade 3D HOA to 2D HOA. Old issue; still havent found the right solution for that.

Compression, EQ etc: in the signal flow chart, these appear to be added prior to the HOA encoding stage. Therefore, to add mastering to the encoded signal, this needs to be added on the master output strip. Correct? If so, I have a feature request to add an EQ and Dyn option to the bus, in the post-encoding / pre-decoding stage.

Correct. Applying EQ/Dyn on the Master would affect the encoded HOA stream. The feature request seems a bit specific, but doable.

– In the HOA bus, I’m missing a way to control the radius and drop (as in the spat.oper). Have these functions been hardwired, or is there somewhere to change them that I have missed?

Indeed, it’s currently hardwired with the default spat oper behavior (1m – 6dB drop). I might make it optional in future versions.

– Question concerning the reverb:
I hear that the reverb is mixed in to the encoded stage, as in the spat.spat / spat.oper approach. Is the reverb implemented with the same method as in spat.spat / spat.oper? Or have you implemented a different reverb approach? Again, something I don’t think I’ll hear until monitoring over a larger HOA loudspeaker array.

The approach is similar. It’s not 100% clear from the signal flow chart, but basically the “Panning Bus” convey the direct sound + early reflections while the “Reverb Bus” convey the diffuse sections (cluster+late reverb).

Finally, another feature request: it would be very nice to be able to choose if the reverb is mixed into the direct HOA outputs, or routed out of a different set of outputs, allowing the user to record direct and reverb as separate layers.

There is an easy workaround for that (although not totally elegant): you could duplicate your HOA bus (using the very same settings in both busses) and mute the pan in the 1st bus and mute the reverb in the 2nd bus. That way, you could route (and record) separately the reverb and the direct layers. (at the expense of a higher CPU load)

Hello,
I have some problems in communicating between ToscA and Panoramix. Tosca sends an ID number, so for example i can just send something like 1/Track/1/distance. Am I correct, am I doing something wrong?
The solution to send to panoramix is to invert syntax, so it gets Track/1/distance/1 and the ID gets cut off. But the reverse is impossible, recording in the DAW the movements in panoramix, as panoramix does not prepend the tosca ID number.
Am I doing something wrong?

Hello,
I have some problems in communicating between ToscA and Panoramix. Tosca sends an ID number fore each instance of the plugin, so for example i can just send something like 1/Track/1/dist… Am I correct, am I doing something wrong?
The solution to send to panoramix is to invert syntax, so it gets Track/1/dist/1 and the ID gets cut off. But the reverse is impossible, recording in the DAW the movements in panoramix, as panoramix does not prepend the tosca ID number.
Am I doing something wrong?

Seems that in Thibault articles the panoramix version is different and has a OSC setup button in option strip….

You are doing nothing wrong.
The communication between ToscA and panoramix is possible, but it is not straightforward (at the moment):
as you noticed, ToscA is using messages like “/1/dist [float]”, while panoramix uses something like “/track/1/dist [float]”.
Consequently you would need to build some sort of a bridge in-between the two applications.
For instance, this bridge could be a (small) Max patcher that
1) receives OSC from ToscA (udpreceive, say on port 8000)
2) prepend the “/track” pattern to the appropriate messages
3) forward the OSC messages to panoramix (udpsend, say on port 8001)
And it could also work in the other way:
4) receives OSC from panoramix (udpreceive, say on port 8002)
5) remove (route) the extra “/track” pattern
6) forward the “/1/dist [float]” messages to ToscA (udpsend, say on port 8003).

For step 5), you might want to have a look at the (free) external object OSC-Route from CNMAT.

In the future, we might release a useful collection OSC tools to ease these operations and/or upgraded version of ToscA.
In the meanwhile, you’ll have to handle these little operations yourself.

I have installed version 0.9.7 (W7 PRO 64 bits).
I got this message at lauch (see picture).I have reinstalled the program with the same result.
I click OK, and Panoramix starts and works normally.
But, the command “Save as” does not open any window, and I cannot save the project.
Any idea?
Thanks

Attachments:

Great!
Saving process is OK.
I have created a project with 2 inputs and 1 binaural output bus.
I have downloaded a few HRTF .sofa files from http://www.sofaconventions.org. I have tried placing them in different folders :
Downloads, Desktop, Documents/Ircam/sofa
I cannot see them in the “Select HRTF” window; Refresh has no effect.
When I connect input 1 and 2 to Binaurel bus, I see this (see attachment).
I did not find a way to donwload the.sofa files inside Panoramix.
Do you know what could be wrong?
Thanks,

Attachments:

Well, unfortunately this is a little bug (Windows only) where the sofa catalog is not properly updated.
It will be fixed in a future release (soon).

In the meanwhile, there is a workaround:
– save your session somewhere (say in session.txt)
– edit this txt file
– you should see a line containing : /bus/1/hrtf ”
(assuming your binaural bus is #1)
– you can edit this line and change it to:
/bus/1/hrtf ‘C:\Users\michel\Desktop\myfile.sofa’
(adjust to the correct path)
– save the txt file
– and then reload it into panoramix
– all tracks connected to the binaural bus will then use ‘myfile.sofa’

At the moment, it is not possible to route a HOA decoded bus to binaural.

Two options/workarounds however:
1) You could connect panoramix to Spat~ and use Spat’s virtual speakers.
2) Or you could re-route the outputs of panoramix to a new input track (Multi) and send this track to a binaural bus.
These two options would require either Jack or some audio loopback connection.
And I acknowledge it would not be 100% user friendly.

There is no plan yet for implementing SOFA HpIR, although it sounds like a reasonable request.
Will have a look at it.